The proposed research involves laboratory experiments, descriptive and ethnographic studies, and intervention with cognitive skill training in order to better discriminate between two models used to explain age-related deficits in prose comprehension. Older adults with average vocabulary skills show age-related deficiencies in the ability to identify and use the logical organization in prose in the amount of information they can remember from prose. A neurological model of aging explains these are deficits through irreversible, random, diffuse cell loss and less efficient cell function in the central nervous system with increasing age, in the absence of diagnosable disease. In contrast, an experiential model explains these deficits as a result of specific, adaptive changes in strategy due to particular environmental changes over the adult life span. Changes in experiential factors across the life span, such as leaving formal schooling or retiring, may cause changes in reading and listening behavior and practice of certain reading and remembering skills. Lack of practice of these skills may be responsible for the large deficits in performance of old adults of average verbal ability on prose recall tasks and recall of the organization of prose in comparison to average verbal young adults. Our past work in the area appears to be more compatible with the experiential model duel to age and verbal ability interactions which have been found both in comprehension for prose and types of reading behaviors used in everyday life. In the propsoed research we want to further explore these factors and investigate the validity of the experiential model for explaining data on prose comprehension across the life span. This investigation will focus on three questions: (1) Does the decrement found in the use of the logical organization in prose for average verbal older adjults begin in middle age: (2) What specifically are the critical differences in reading and information processing activities in the everyday lives of young, middle, and old adults with high and average vocabulary skills? (3) Can intervention with a program to teach cognitive skills directly applicable to the recall of the logic and information in prose improve the comprehension average verbal ability older adults?